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Democracy's Living Room: Twenty and Counting

To celebrate 20 years on air, the BL Show has invited 20-year olds from around New York to join us in the Greene Space. They share their thoughts on how the world has changed over the course of their lifetime, and what to expect from the next two decades.

Comments [11]

JohnP
from New York

First off..Auguri cent'anni, Mazel tov'. I've been an avid supporter and part of my salary went to WNYC, in part, because of your program.

I'm a 50+ year old and I had the pleasure of a varied career, teaching math, trading bonds, doing research in comp sci, serving in wartime and best of all being a dad. I would like to tell the young people to always follow their deepest interest, but in my gut I know that the vicissitudes of life take us into different directions. What I tell students and my kids is that it's important to be prepared and well rounded educationally, but also to critique things, not to be attached to what you have because it can all evaporate in the blink of an eye. Over indulgence and attachment to things and modes of understanding is what they will have to face as they confront entrenched ideas and sloppy morality. Young people don't have that maturity as yet, but at least they heard the lecture.

"If you want to make G_d laugh, tell him / her your plans for tomorrow."

PS - to the cancer survivor -- under any of the Democrat health care plans and most socialized health systems, as a young person you probably would have been asked to wait months for tests and you would have died under those plans or ObamaCare.

Sorry, again - the truth of ObamaCare will really hurt most of America while only mildly helping a few of us.

Calls 'Em -- only you could try to throw cold water on this celebratory day. What exactly is the point of your irrelevant rant? And living in Virginia why bother to critize a New York institution? We'll take care of it ourselves, thank you very much. Take your trollish ways somewhere else.

I've been listening since the show first aired in 1989. When the show started I was working form home. Always had a radio in my work space no matter where I was working. Now I can listen online even when out of town. This show accompanies my work just about every day. Happy Anniversary Brian!

Can you ask Laura why "on air democracy" has decreased so much over the past few years? You take fewer calls and Lenny takes very few calls -- a real slight to your listeners and contributors.

The balanced nature of your show has also radically declined over the past few years. This has not been a good thing.

Can you also ask Laura why WNYC will not accept funds from “not for profits” if the station feels that those groups are not "PC?" I offered Vince G. a yearly $50,000 per year contribution with an on-air credit to shooting sports federations including those involving women and the disabled, yet the money was rejected.

That’s a lot of money for a cash starved station. The station shouldn't get Gov’t funds and beg for money on one hand when it rejects large donors with the other. I guess all that “Move On” type money has kept you guys flush, but did it “BUY” your bias?

PS - it’s amazing how uninformed your “20 something’s” are. When I was twenty I knew almost everything my Dad and Grand Dad’s knew when they were twenty. Perhaps this is the product of our “anti-historical” culture or just that too many kids have had kids and grew up without parents or without parents that know anything about America or history. Like Barry Obama’s upbringing.

Mazel tov & Happy 20th Anniversary to Brian, the crew, & the show! I'm glad to know I'd only missed 3 years of it when I started listening to what was then called On the Line in 1992. I can't count how many times I've wanted to ask 1 of the guests something & heard Brian ask it before I could even dial; certainly it's been far more than the times I've wondered why he *didn't* ask that question! I've been a frequent caller (& now poster) in the years since & a fan the whole time.

Please, what you should do is bring 15-30 year olds into the studio to listen to 40 - 100+ year olds from every walk of life from prisoners to brain surgeons to give the "young'ins" a reality check on life. They need to know what was and what is before they tell us what will be.

That’s why so many sleazy and lying politicians are able to get away with so much including proposing the reestablishment of a corporate statist National Socialism. The young folk don’t know that almost everything the Obama administration is trying to impose on America today has failed in the past.

I work in finance and I am generally sympathetic to the ideas of Michael Moore.

However, we do understand what CDS (credit default swaps) are. They are, in fact, not hard to understand. I agree that their unfettered usage and the implicit leverage in them can cause tremendous problems.

A corporate credit default swap, basically, is a "synthetic" corporate bond. This is to say that it is an agreement between two parties that one party will mimic the payment stream of the underlying corporate bond to the other party. The other party, in turn, will absorb the credit loss, should there be one.

Corporate CDS are different from corporate bonds because you have to put up virtually no money to enter into them - allowing for tremendous leverage. The market value of a credit default swap is intended to mirror the change in the underlying physical corporate bond.

Asset backed CDS act in the same way, only that the underlying bond is a sub-prime bond. As most of those (at least the lower-rated ones) have been wiped out, so have the CDS issued on them. Unfortunately, it was much easier to enter into a CDS of the asset-backed bond than to buy the cash-bond. There is only one cash bond and there are theoretically infinite amounts of CDS that can be issued on the asset backed bonds. Also, you can only go "long" the cash bond, but you can go "long" or "short" the CDS - so it worked well to hedge asset backed exposure.

Often these bonds were then placed into CDOs which further leveraged them.

It is not that hard to understand, it is not that mathematically challenging.

I am happy to speak with Michael about this. I am not saying I agree with the extent/usage of CDS but there are people who understand them.

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